Allowing persons to communicate and share information with each other is one of the fundamental aspects of collaboration, problem solving, negotiation, teaching and education, etc. To assist in communication, there has been an explosion of electronic communication tools.
One classic approach is the lecture or seminar often involving a presentation using presentation software. To a large extent the traditional single person presentation or lecture has been maintained with the audience being in a rather passive mode as far as determining, constructing, augmenting or modifying the information to be presented is concerned.
The AMIDA Final Public Report describes the overall methodology behind the development of meeting support technologies. It reports that numerous studies confirm that meetings dominate the way people work. Namely, according to a study conducted by MCI Worldcom in 2003 a business person participates in 60 meetings per month. People meet in groups for a multitude of reasons. They interact in numerous predictable and unpredictable ways and the results of their interactions are as varied as the people who participate and the projects on which they are collaborating or communicating. Studies of business processes also reveal that approximately 80% of the “workload” associated with a project or process happens in preparation for a meeting. In other words, many people view the “live” meeting as a milestone or deadline by which they can pace and measure their productivity and that of their colleagues. Unfortunately, for many information managers, being in perpetual meetings has reduced their ability to prepare adequately for the next meeting, perpetuating a vicious and negative cycle.
As other business processes, meetings are going digital. Increasingly, people are using computer technology alone and in conjunction with broadband networks to support their meeting objectives prior to and during an actual meeting. For example, e-mail is used to pass around files for people to read prior to a meeting.
Collaborative workspaces in corporate networks and on the Internet offer geographically distributed collaborators a virtual repository for documents related to a project or a meeting. Electronic meeting support systems, such as interactive network-connected white boards and videoconferencing appliances, are available for the benefit of those who share the same room as well as those who are in remote locations. Computer-supported collaborative work technologies, particularly those which capture human verbal and non-verbal communications (audio and video interaction) in addition to text and graphics generated during a meeting, also promise to have a long term impact on how people will prepare for and behave during and following meetings.
However, Marc Al-Hames et al. report in “Audio-Visual Processing in Meetings: Seven Questions and Current AMI Answers”, that although large parts of working days are consumed by meetings and conferences, unfortunately a lot of them are neither efficient, nor especially successful. They report a study in which people were asked to select emotion terms that they thought would be frequently experienced in a meeting. The top answer—mentioned from more than two third of the participants—was “boring”; furthermore nearly one third mentioned “annoyed” as a frequently perceived emotion.
Hence, despite the plethora of electronic aids to meetings, fundamental problems in handling meetings have not been solved. In fact organising and conducting meetings in a business context involves a large number of factors. Some of these factors are addressed below.
For example, the lack of efficiency is addressed in the article “Mood indicators on electronic meeting tools” IBM, IP.com number: IPCOM000011711D, Publication Date: Mar. 12, 2003. This article addresses the issue that the lack of direct feedback makes meetings clumsy, inefficient and often unproductive. It proposes a “mood indicator” as well as an “I want to ask a question” indicator which allow the presenter to choose an appropriate moment to pause, change track or field a question. It is argued that interrupting a presenter in full flow can be awkward; however, sometimes it is difficult to get an opportunity to ask a question or make a comment when many different people are trying to make their voices heard. In a similar vein, U.S. Pat. No. 6,966,035 suggests displaying a “murmur frame” for a participant to express a view. To increase user participation, US 2010/0087139 discloses a system for sending a selection to another computer, and US 2006/0095376 discloses a system for secure voting. Commenting, voting or selecting requires that a central authority provides the information that is to be selected or commented or voted on. Hence, these proposals still leave a central figure such as the presenter in a dominating position and the other members of the meeting are largely an audience with limited selection or voting or participation rights.
In the past, the relatively high infrastructure cost of a projector and the installation of the surface to project on lead to a typical setup of one more or less big central screen. In simple setups and small screens, only one source can be shown at the same time. If people need to share more than one source at the same time, a more or less complex and expensive infrastructure is required in the sense of a larger and more expensive projector, a bigger screen real estate and a complex and expensive video composition device to drive the display. Recently, flat displays have become available at low cost with significant advantages: there is no need to foresee a special surface to project on, such displays do not produce as much noise as a projector, the display is visible in more diverse lighting conditions, the installation is much simpler and cheaper and the overall cost can be much lower. This could lead to different meeting setups where multiple flat displays are used to provide more screen real estate in the meeting room. A problem that remains however is how to distribute the visual content to be shown over the available screens in such a way that it is cost effective and not too complex for meeting participants.
Another unsolved issue is how to let people take personal notes in a meeting that also include snapshots of the content shown in the meeting. One used solution is to take snapshots with a smart mobile device with a built-in camera. This only works however if the user is sufficiently close and perpendicular to the screen, nobody is in the line of sight and the ambient lighting conditions are good enough. Even with picture processing applications running on the mobile device that correct color, aspect ratio and lighting effects, the quality of snapshots taken this way is poor.
When a meeting is continued at a different time and/or place, it is often required to take back all the originally used presentation devices of the different participants, despite the fact that in many cases, only a few overview visuals of a previous meeting are needed where people want to refer to. The presenter may also have changed the visual in between the two meetings, in which case it is not possible to refer exactly to the visual shown in a previous meeting. In some situations, it is a legal requirement that presentations, comments and submissions need to be completely reproducible.